P for Personably, introducing our new logo

When I first heard about Personably and checked out the website, I really liked the logo and the colours. They’re different to the majority of other designs out there at the moment. Other SaaS companies in the HR and People Ops space tend to go for much safer designs and colours (there is so much blue).

Having now worked with the logo, the colours and fonts for a few months (and wanting to get some sweet, sweet swag)—it felt that the current branding could be iterated on!

We’re excited to introduce our new logo:

We wanted the icon when used by itself to be more recognisable as a ‘P’ and to utilise all three of our main brand colours.

It comprises of three overlapping shapes, which represent the stages a new hire will go through: accepting the offer, being on boarded in their first few weeks and months, and their continuing employee experience. All of which feed into one-another.

Our colours have been slightly updated, and the eagle-eyed among you may notice that we’ve named our colours after different bird breeds. With canary being our warning colour, a throwback to how canaries were used to warn coal miners that there were dangerous gases in the air.

We’ve also updated the colours to have better contrast and to pass WCAG colour contrast requirements when used as text, large text or backgrounds.

Having previously used Lato, FreightSans and FatFrank - all of which have their own individual pros and cons. Whilst FatFrank looks great at larger sizes, it doesn't work as well at the smaller sizes we needed to use it at for subtitles and on mobile, as it became quite difficult to read. FreightSans and Lato have the opposite issue, they work well at small sizes but aren't display typefaces, so look odd when their made too big.

Choosing a typeface wasn’t an easy feat, having a shortlist of 4–6 typefaces which changed every week. This tweet accurately summarises the experience:

Choosing a typeface is as easy as picking out a comfy pair of shoes in the morning—IF YOU HAD 3500 PAIRS OF SHOES goodbye see you in 14 hours.

That said, Silka ticks a lot of boxes! It has a large x-height meaning it works well at smaller sizes and is better for readability. The font is elegant enough to be used at larger sizes as a display font too, allowing us to minimise the number of fonts we will be using and load times.

“It’s done.”“Yes Mr Frodo… It’s over now.”

– Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee, [spoiler] after destroying The Ring, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King

Unlike Frodo and Samwise in their quest to destroy the ring, branding is never over. It will continue to be updated to match our product’s continual growth and iteration! 🚀

Big thanks to Sean from Nested, Rosie from Fat Llama and everyone else who got a sneak peak and gave really useful feedback!